OSE Campus Levels
The OSE Campus is a modular unit of civilization-creation promoted by OSE. It is a charter-city like entity, a small city-state, special economic zone, or resilient community. It is structured like a mixture of an eco-industrial park, a nature conservation zone, and a university. For widespread replication, it must embody a wide range of lifestyles. Each campus is nominally a square mile, and is capable of producing advanced civilization.
The population question comes in. How many human denizens should such a campus have, in order to fulfill its mission of transforming society to a prosperous democracy? This is an example much needed, to midcourse correct to full regenerative living on earth - across all areas of the world.
The upper population limit is that required to embody the most advanced technology. Such as semiconductors for modern devices. Many technologies, it can be said, cumulate to produce semiconductors. Many of the Global Village Construction Set technologies are basic - infrastructure, food, energy, etc. Semiconductors derive from these basics - at a higher level of refinement, knowhow, and skill. Given that OSE believes in efficiency, we must attempt to achieve things on the smallest possible scale. This is influenced by the message from half a century ago - Small is Beautiful by Schumacher - which proposed that societal order breaks down at a certain scale. We know that this order is currently broken - with centralized production. But what is the smallest successful scale sufficient for advanced civilization? That is the question that OSE aims to answer. It may be said that the maximum population of the OSE Campus is that determined by the minimum required to produce semiconductors - and thus produce an information age tech set.
We currently take 240 people as the basic size of an economy that can provide housing, transportation, food, and technology in a regenerative way. Many such proofs of concept of industrial productivity on a small scale occurred already at Factor e Farm - such as aquaponics, tractor production, Extreme Builds of houses in 5 days, 3D printers, biodigesters, earthworks, and more. But it's a different story to go from proof of concept to an actual, highly functional global village that sets trends in human development and advancement. This is the current phase - how do we operate effectively as a city-state, and how do we spread the benefit to the surrounding community?
If 240 is sufficient for an economy similar to the 'industrial civilization in a box' or like the 'Amish with automation' - how many more people until we have open source knowledge of chip manufacturing? See Cost of Semiconductor Manufacturing. For $10M and in-house cohort of 24 IC makers, we can build earliest microcomputers easily. How much further than this? Ask Luke Leighton.
Levels
- One - Amish + using microchips. Below this, and we have religious toil.
- Two - Amish + making microchips.